MudMan
@MudMan@fedia.io
- Comment on 'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash 1 day ago:
I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn't even own the company, surely someone at Take 2 could just go... you know... shush.
I don't even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.
"We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we'll be looking into performance improvements in future patches". It's not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.
- Comment on Who plays like that x_x 5 days ago:
I used to be inverted until controller FPSs started to be a thing. I don't think people realize how long PC FPSs were mostly a keyboard-only thing. By the time WASD+Mouse standardized, quite late into the Quake 1 era I had hundreds of hours on Tie Fighter/X-Wing and a bunch of other first person flight games.
Hell, Descent predates Quake, and I'd argue it figured out full 3D controls way before Quake did.
Now that I'm on board this train of thought, do kids these days think Doom played with full mouseview and just distorted all over the place? Is it well known for people not born at the time that Doom was mechanically closer to a twin stick shooter than an FPS or have all the source ports erased that from history?
- Comment on Why Shouldn't I Use A Small Gaming PC 6 days ago:
Yeah. You're basically buying a laptop crammed into a small box. May as well get a laptop if you need the small footprint and portability or a desktop if you need the price-to-performance.
Also, the Steam Deck thing people keep repeating is terrible advice. Even these can power their components somewhat robustly. A docked Steam Deck is still a 10W APU for no good reason. It depends on use case, in that you also get a handheld out of the deal, but if you're looking for a primary device even a laptop would be a better choice.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
The vast majority of people to be read as "a tiny fraction of players". It's just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn't be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.
While I don't have hard data on this, I can tell you I've played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.
Intuitive perception on this stuff gets weird.
- Comment on A conundrum 1 week ago:
Yeah, that'd work a lot better for me if I was American and not painfully aware of similar issues happening in cities where cars fold like umbrellas and are almost entirely parked underground.
- Comment on A conundrum 1 week ago:
Yeeeeah, I was too adult in 2008 to go "you know the real problem? We check too hard for solvency when giving out mortgages".
Not that I have a silver bullet for solving a housing crisis. There probably isn't one. You need a lot more public housing as a percentage of the total pool, that much I can tell. How you fix a job market where nobody holds the same position for more than a handful of years is beyond me. You probbly need to make it much more expensive to own a house without living in it or renting it out. You definitely want to make it much more expensive for corporations to own housing.
Guessing that's harder to fit in a pithy, viralt tweet, though.
- Comment on PSA 1 week ago:
I mean... I'm trying to be snarky, but I'm finding it hard ot argue that it's bad advice.
- Comment on winter fans 2 weeks ago:
It's been raining for five days after months of heatwaves and I'm sleeping with my windows open.
- Comment on advertising and headers take up 50% of screen space 3 weeks ago:
Ah. That's more of an accessibility issue than an advertising issue, then. I imagine even without ads a bunch of modern websites expecting higher resolutions and smaller scaling factors will look cramped.
I was not kidding before, if you have vision problems that don't play well with desktop views, mobile versions of websites tend to be a LOT friendlier to large text sizes. Have you tried setting your browser to a vertical window and calling up the phone version? On Firefox at least you can set the resolution of the phone you're emulating and zoom it all the way up. The setting is buried in the developer tools, but there are tons of tutorials out there (TLDR, press F12, look for the button that looks like a tablet/phone).
- Comment on advertising and headers take up 50% of screen space 3 weeks ago:
What resolution are you browsing at? I have a hard time showing that ad at all in my setup, but I'm not even at 4K and I get a HUGE picture of the rocket in question and still see more text than you show in the screenshot. That's what? 720p?
I man, don't get me wrong, ads are annoying, there's a reason why I have so many layers of blocking I couldn't even shut them all off to test this, but you seem to be browsing at what I'd call... legacy resolutions. You'd almost be better off twisting that screen 90 degrees and asking for the mobile version.
- Comment on Let's discuss: God of War 3 weeks ago:
I don't have much to disagree with there, frankly. I mean, I like GoW 3 less than you do. I'd genuinely play the Ninja Theory DMC, if I'm honest, but at that point we're splitting hairs.
To be clear, I don't hate these games, I just don't like them much and generally don't play them on purpose. We're coming at it from different angles but meeting pretty much halfway.
- Comment on Let's discuss: God of War 3 weeks ago:
They definitely moved towards... I'm gonna say better references later in the franchise.
Still, there's also a reason they moved to a whole different genre.
GoW's core combat premise is that you have absurd range and can deal damage in a wide arc. It was REALLY hard to tighten that all the way via iteration while keeping the way the game plays.
GoW 3 was a huge step above its predecessors in setting up big standout setpieces, and it played... I'm gonna say "better", but it was still limited by the core framework of the series so far, and my argument is that framework was fundamentally flawed.
- Comment on Let's discuss: God of War 3 weeks ago:
I don't particularly love the floaty, sloppy "just put some damage in this 180 degree arc" basis of the combat system much. I am also not at all on board with most of the early teenage edgelord narrative stuff in there. Maybe I was a bit too old by the time these came out.
The Harryhausen references are neat and some of the boss fights are cool set pieces that did set some of the groundwork for later AAA action games, but I would much rather spend time in the more expressive, free-flowing Devil May Cry side of things if I'm going for snappy, precise combat... or all the way into Musou slop, I suppose, although I'm not much into that, either.
- Comment on Is "AI" the end of truth? 3 weeks ago:
This is true. I had been thinking my previous post was a bit too optimistic, actually. For the sake of making a point I implied that conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers didn't previously exist. They existed. There was plenty of public conflict about masking and social distancing in the 1918 flu. The AIDS panic was horrific and obviously this isn't the first time that hate discourse puts fascists in power in a major superpower, let alone in a country overall.
The real issue with the Internet isn't the flexibility of truth, it's the ease in diseminating the satisfying falsehood. With no source of authority over which truths are acceptable and what lies are shameful you end up in a worldwide radicalization engine. It's not that the old gatekeepers told you the truth, either. They still don't. But at least we all had some culture-wide baseline for acceptable narratives.
But hey, people can keep hating ont he obvious boogeyman of AI. At least it's a start of realizing what the pattern is. It's still not "the end of truth", but like I said elsewhere, if it gets people to start noticing these things we'll be better off than when social media was doing the exact same thing to us as a global society without anybody realizing.
- Comment on Is "AI" the end of truth? 3 weeks ago:
It does say "check the results manually". Not that this changes anything. For the record, always double check anything any AI tells you unless you can verify the response off the top of your head. Also for the record, double check anything anybody else tells you. If you haven't seen it from more than one source, you don't know if it's true.
Hell, if the thing people learn from AI summaries is to never believe anything the see on the Internet without double checking it we'll be better off than we were before.
Also, every negative impact you assign to AI is also applicable to traditional search. I was hearing communication scholars warn people of the issues with algorithmic selection and personalized search back in the 90s. They were correct.
I am endlessly fascinated by the billions of boiling frogs that hadn't realized their perception of the world was owned by Google until Google made a noticeably change to their advertising engine. I am increasingly glad that AI is as unreliable as it is at this point.
- Comment on Let's discuss: God of War 3 weeks ago:
Frankly, I don't think any of the originals are particularly good, and I was done with the new one just before the first one was over. They aren't terrible, but I've always found the praise and hype for the series entirely disproportionate to the content.
- Comment on We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I'm gonna say this person doesn't hate to keep knocking on Veilguard, because that seems to be the one example they can bring up. I mean, there's a cursory name check of Dawntrail, but otherwise... yeah, not sure what games this is talking about other than Dragon Age.
Clair Obscur didn't do that. It went to absolute pains to not do that, in fact, to the point where I find the deceptive twist-building a bit over the top, in retrospect. I wouldn't accuse the CDPR games of going that route. Baldur's Gate does overexplain often, but in their defense the game has a million characters, plot points you go through out of order and a runtime in the hundreds of hours, so I wouldn't change that.
What else is even doing this? I feel like we're back in "AAA sucks" territory where AAA stands in for "this one game I didn't like". Writing in games runs the gamut. I would struggle to find a single defining thing to praise or criticise across the board.
- Comment on What game(s) could you not get into but with a handheld device you started to like the game(s) 3 weeks ago:
I'm struggling with this question, because these days I almost do that backwards. I will get a game and ask "what's the device I'd like to use for this"?
I mean, I've been playing a fair amount of Monster Train 2. I have no interest in sitting at a desk for that, or to put it up on a massive screen. Been playing a bunch of Tetris the Grand Master, which is not a great fit for a heavy handheld. Donkey Kong Bananza? Mostly TV, felt off on the handheld screen.
I think when you go back to emulation there's a bunch of games that are deceptively better on the go. That was the Switch's original party tirck, right? Hey, turns out Mario 64's short star runs are a great fit for sitting on the toilet. Who knew? Random JRPG being played one-handed on a tiny Android device? Surprisingly decent.
But at this point software is just this weird blob, I just pick a controller/device combo that fits for each game.
- Comment on Is "AI" the end of truth? 3 weeks ago:
No, it doesn't.
I'm so made about people buying into the fake hype.
The death of truth was social media. Or squishy human brains on social media, I suppose. We just came from a massive argument about whether vaccines work, whether masks are useful in the middle of a repiratory virus pandemic and a bunch of Americans believed there was a pizzeria pedophilia vampire ring so much they elected a fascist turd president. Twice.
What the hell is marginally better photo doctoring going to do in that context? Who gives an actual crap?
The only real concern you should have is you now shouldn't trust phone calls that sound vaguely like someone you know from a phone number you don't recognize. And maybe if you get a video call from a celebrity standing suspiciously still don't wire them all your money.
Otherwise we're just as boned as we were five years ago.
- Comment on Anon is a gamer 3 weeks ago:
Consistent performance and good thermals are important, but that's the poing of having a performance target. You decide what fps you want to get and tune settings until you get it with the best possible visuals. It's definitely not potato fidelity across the board.
Of course it depends on your hardware, but there are plenty of games that run on more than potato mode even on integrated graphics these days.
- Comment on Anon is a gamer 3 weeks ago:
I'm being facetious. I just don't grasp leaving visual fidelity on the table for overkill performance.
There are two ways to approach PC gaming's fiddly, inconsistent performance in my book: either you have hardware powerful enough to crank it up and forget about it or... you do the actual work of setting up a target for performance and tuning the game to perform within that spec.
- Comment on Anon is a gamer 3 weeks ago:
I recognize the words you are using, but they don't seem to make any sense to me when put in that order.
- Comment on The problem with sleeper ships 1 year ago:
I mean, we're halfway through... not sure if a novel, but it's surely like a young adult TV show or the setup for a looter shooter or something.
- Comment on What JRPG combat is your favorite? 1 year ago:
I'll take persona, although it's been way too many games with the same setup. Ditto for the Trails series.
Honestly, I don't think it got any better than ATB systems in FF 6 and 7. Everybody else is either riffing on those or spending so much money they think they can't be those and need to be Devil May Cry instead.
- Comment on The problem with sleeper ships 1 year ago:
You kind of answer your own question there, honestly. If you're at the point where you can somehow convince hundreds to thousands of people to get a one way ticket to turning into a space popsicle for the chance of eventually turning into xenomorph chowder, then you can probably also do better than that eventually.
So from that perspective we both hard agree that interstellar travel is probably not practical to any degree of technology below full-on Star Trek. But also, we both hard disagree that "shoot people into space to die as soon as you have the ability" is something that any society is ever going to do. If some modicum of a survival instinct is needed to evolve intelligence, then the answer to the Fermi paradox is that aliens looked at the practicalities of actual interstellar travel and went "Hell, no".
If anybody out there is willing to do interstellar colonization you better believe that it's because their star is about to pop and they'll try that exactly once.
- Comment on The problem with sleeper ships 1 year ago:
It's a good argument against trying sleeper/generation ships.
In practice, though, the actual sleepers would be so happy to arrive to find a nice McDonalds and a charming small town instead of shuttling down into the middle of uninhabited Arrakis with a 3D printer and a prayer.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 1 year ago:
Wait, so it gets you high on top of everything else? People would be using this even if it did nothing else, what the heck?
Stop it. Stop making me think about the stupid wizard thing. Not worth it. So dumb.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 1 year ago:
Wait, the reason they don't use this potion is that it's hard to make?
Wouldn't you make it once and use it to make more by just dumping random ingredients in a pot to get an infinite supply? It seems like the wishing for more wishes situation pretty straight up.
This is what I get for letting you trick me into thinking about this dumb thing, I suppose.
- Comment on Geohydtotypography 1 year ago:
Hold on, over how many lines? How was this estimate made? I demand to know what latitude gets the first line change for a given text. Also how much text you'd need and whether we have a single source that would fit.
- Comment on How did gravity worked on the Death Star? 1 year ago:
Oh, yeah, no, but that's because I'm a nerd.